[RichardSpector]

I've just recently been introduced to Kodi, and I was very impressed. So with my home project of wiring the house with CAT6 cable, I started wondering if I could load up 5 VM's of Kodi on a server and somehow stream to 5 smart TVs? My first thought was to get a managed switch and route the networking to those TV's and use a CAT5 to HDMI converter, but not sure if that will work. I'd like to just wire the rooms once. I'm not sure how to handle the video/sound if possible with the CAT6 cable or another option.

I'm running Kodi on a Fedora 25 VM if that matters.

Thanks in advance.

[Prof Yaffle]

That's really not how Kodi is meant to operate. Even if you can get it running well in a VM, the screen-sharing and audio options would just be awful.

It's more intended to run on a small computer, directly connected to the TV (or even running *on* the TV if your televisions happen to be Android-based). Raspberry Pis are cheap and effective, as are many Android-based devices like Firesticks.

[Daemaz]

I have one instance of Kodi running in a VM Ubuntu 16.04. I'm using a HD 4350 with the gpu passthrough in Proxmox, and also passing through an MCE USB receiver. The HDMI is converted to CAT6 and ran into the bedroom, converted back to HDMI and then in the TV. I learned the hard way that it has to be a direct run; I tried running it through a patch panel before but I could not get 1080p60 to display (1080p24 and 720p60 was fine), likely due to the signal loss at the patch panel.

The HDMI converter also passes IR, so I have a transmitter underneath the TV which is relayed back to the USB receiver where the server is.

Visual diagram (used an HD 4350 instead of a GT 730):


Here's a pic with 1080p60 playing successfully:


I used J-Tech HDMI/IR extenders:


J-Tech receiver mounted behind my dresser, out of site:


I did this to be able to remove a physical box in the bedroom as it was taking up room on my dresser. As a bonus it's also quieter. I already had the infrastructure in place so I figured I'd give it a shot. I also have another VM with a GPU passthrough, but that's a Windows 10 box for my wife in the office.

5 VMs is a little ambitious for all to have GPU passthrough: my motherboard only has 5 available slots and 2 of them are taken by a quad NIC adapter and an HBA controller card. You'd have to make sure the IOMMU can separate each PCI-E slot (some are grouped) and some of it is just praying up above for it to work. I found with vfio it's hard to use two cards that have the same vendorID. I actually have two GT 710s that are different (one is an MSI and the other is eVGA) but the device and vendor IDs are the same so I'm unable to pass both of them at the same time successfully.

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=298882 - a link to an earlier thread I made about virtualizing Kodi.

Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be glad to share my experiences.

[Milhouse]

A Raspberry Pi is about the size of your HDMI reciever...

[nickr]

And quiet too